“A compass points to true north, but it gives no indication
of the swamps and marshes along the way. If you just use the compass you
will get stuck, and what use is knowing true north if you are drowned in a
swamp?”
—Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln
I
had the immense pleasure of revisiting Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for the first time in at what must be at least
over half a decade if not longer. It appears, since its release, the film has
been attacked more and more for essentially being a piece of propaganda—well
made and beautifully shot propaganda, but propaganda nonetheless. I'm told that Saving Private Ryan valorizes
the soldiers of World War II while slyly attacking the generation of both soldiers and films of the Vietnam Era.
Certainly
Saving Private Ryan asks us the
memorialize all those who fought in the Greatest Generation, but what the film doesn’t do is ask us to see their
heroics in the same way American culture often does. Saving Private Ryan is essentially a response to the Norman
Rockwell way of life, often using his iconography to question what the good
society is. In the end, Spielberg proposes a radical social democracy that
mirrors Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful
Life, where democracy and our relationship to it is not built on the
principles of the state, but a series of small intimate relationships built
around living the good life.
